A fast-track political career put him on the wrong side

Sunday

Jun 23, 2013 at 3:30 AM

The motion picture "Argo" hit home for Fred Nasseri of Wilmington.

By Ben SteelmanBen.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com

The motion picture "Argo" hit home for Fred Nasseri of Wilmington.Now 75 and the proprietor of the Gallery of Oriental Rugs in Wilmington, Nasseri was held in the same Tehran prison as the hostages seized from the U.S. Embassy by Iranian militants.Like some of the hostages, he was dragged before firing squads – only to discover, at the last moment, that the whole affair was a cruel charade. Many of his fellow hostages weren't so lucky. Nasseri heard gunfire, and they never returned to their cells."I never saw daylight for 180 days," he said.And the officials of the old regime, hanged from construction cranes on the corner of Tehran streets, that "Argo" star Ben Affleck sees from his taxi? Fred Nasseri was nearly one of them."When you're dealing with crazy people," Nasseri said, "you have to be smarter than they are."Born Fereydoun Naseri, the young French-trained lawyer had enjoyed a fast-track career as a diplomat under the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. With a Ph.D. in economics from Tehran University, he was marked as an expert, rising to deputy minister of labor in the shah's government. As such, he had represented his country in high-level economic talks in Washington in 1975, meeting with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA director Richard Helms.Later, he served as a financial adviser to the shah's wife, Empress Farah, and held a post equivalent to the U.S. White House budget director.Nasseri described himself as a "technocrat," not a particular supporter of the shah but generally favorable to the regime. He concedes that the Iranian monarch often ruled undemocratically, using his secret police, SAVAK, to suppress dissent. He also concedes that pre-revolutionary Iran was often corrupt, with the flood of petro-dollars from its oil exports often flowing into private pockets.Still, he thinks the shah's regime was generally positive. He described the shah as a secular modernizer who revered the United States and did much to support it. After the Vietnam War, he noted, the shah assigned several officials, including Nasseri, to help resettle hundreds of Vietnamese refugees in Iran.Then came the wave of strikes and protests, focused around the formerly exiled Shi'ite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. On Jan. 16, 1979, the shah fled the country. Shortly afterward, Nasseri – who had served in the cabinet of the shah's last prime minister, Shahpour Bahktiar – was placed under house arrest.In a way, Nasseri was lucky. His wife and three children had already traveled to Fayetteville, Ark., to visit relatives so they were safely out of the country. As the Iranian revolution veered more and more to extemes, however, Nasseri became a target.The Carter Administration made a key mistake, Nasseri argued. Militant Khomeini supporters had briefly broken into the U.S. Embassy in Tehran earlier in 1979, but the State Department did nothing to cut the embassy's staff or make better arrangements for document security. Then, on Nov. 4, 1979, a mob broke into the embassy, taking 52 Americans hostage. The Iranian government ultimately held them for 444 days. ("Argo" retells the based-on-fact story of how six embassy employees took refuge with the Canadian ambassador. They were eventually smuggled out of the country by a CIA rescue team.)Diplomats and Marines had tried to shred the embassy's documents as the miltants broke in. The Khomeini regime, however, brought in apprentice rug-weavers who patiently pasted the strips of paper back together. Thousands of U.S. secrets were revealed – including the detail that the American labor attache had actually worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.Naturally, in his labor post, Nasseri had been dealing with this particular attache. "They think if you are talking to a CIA agent, then you must be a CIA man," he said.Militiamen dragged Nasseri to prison, where he was kept in solitary confinement for a month. Daily, he was interrogated about his supposed CIA contacts. "They thought Henry Kissinger gave me all the secrets of the United States," he said.At one point, an interrogator told Nasseri that the minimum sentence for his crimes was death. Nasseri couldn't help being sarcastic. "And what is the maximum sentence?" he asked. A guard knocked him to the ground with the butt of a gun.Nasseri said he suffered cracked ribs from his brutal treatment. At least 10 times, he was dragged out for fake executions, standing blindfolded while his captors waited for him to crack.Sometimes, his interrogators would come back after jailmates were executed. "OK, your friends didn't talk, so we killed your friends," they said. "Now you better tell us your secrets."Then, incredibly, they let him go. The jails were too crowded with enemies of the new regime.Nasseri knew this was only a temporary reprieve. Using his old contacts, he managed to obtain fake ID papers from the Pakistani embassy and slipped over the border to Pakistan. Then he made his way to Germany, and Secretary of State Kissinger helped ease his way into the United States.Nasseri escaped only with his life. All his property was seized by the regime. Now in his 40s, he had to start over.For two years, using his French law degree, he worked in France. Then, in 1986, he entered the persian rug business with a fellow Iranian emigre in Garden City, N.J. In 1988, he opened his first shop in Wilmington, in a small former drugstore. Today, the Gallery of Oriental Rugs occupies an 18,000-square-foot building at 4101 Oleander Drive. A second store operates in Myrtle Beach, S.C.Nasseri said that the "Argo" version of the Iranian revolution was "realistic" but also "very mild." Producers softened the ill treatment the American hostages received at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards. This is probably a good thing, he added; otherwise some viewers might have lashed out against Iranian-Americans."Most people in Iran are not fighters," he said. "They love music, poetry, wine."Nasseri is in touch with supporters of the shah's son, the former crown prince, who is quietly trying to influence Iranian politics behind the scene. "He doesn't want to be shah, he doesn't want to be prime minister," Nasseri said. "He just wants Iran to be free."Now, however, Nasseri considers himself 100 percent American – and is grateful to his adopted country."At one time, I was not free," he said. "Now I know what freedom means. I know what opportunity means. So many Americans don't know that. And they complain."